Many Vega Improvements & Other Fixes Land In Mesa For RADV Vulkan Driver

With Mesa 17.3 expected to be branched this weekend and this marking the end of feature development for this last stable Mesa series of 2017, the RADV Radeon Vulkan drivers in particular have been busy landing a lot of last minute code.

In the past three days alone have been more than 50 commits pertaining to the RADV driver, many of the commits being just overnight. Some of the prominent work includes tessellation shader support now being enabled for RX Vega (GFX9) hardware as well as geometry shaders also now being ready for these latest-generation AMD GPUs.

There are also a number of RADV fixes and other work squeezing into this next Mesa 3D quarterly feature update.

With geometry shader support landing for Vega/GFX9, this is also the last of the device features that were not supported, bringing it to feature parity with other generations of Radeon GPUs like Polaris.

In general, the few Vulkan device features not currently supported by RADV include ETC2 compression, ASTC LDR compression, storage image multi-sample, variable pointers, and int16 support.

And, unfortunately, no updates from AMD yet on their open-sourcing Vulkan driver plans on when that may finally happen or other shifts in focus as a result of the RADV driver's continuing success.